You know the ones. The latest diet ‘miracle’ that will enable the dieter to lose a staggering amount of weight in a short space of time. Invariably there will be a celebrity spokesperson who illustrates the effectiveness of this detox/tablet/starvation regime (nearly always a female wearing a bikini or tiny workout gear) by showing off her incredible weight loss.

Look, we know we’re not going to look like this in 6 weeks (Picture: Alamy)

She endorses the diet by wittering on about how much more energy she has now, how much her life has improved and how she hates looking at pictures of how she was before. There is never any mention of any alleged airbrushing of her pictures and, a few months later, how she has gone right back up to her previous weight plus another couple of stone for good measure.

2. Fad diets are boring, and if you’re on one, you will be too

No one is interested in how many grams of fat are in a slice of chocolate cake, or how many points you have left for the day, except you. There is nothing worse than a fad diet bore droning on about calorie content. No one cares that you’ve cut out an entire food group, or that you subsist on meal replacement shakes, or some other unsustainable way of eating.

Don’t become a calorie counting diet bore (Picture: file)

3. The only pounds you will permanently rid yourself of are probably the ones in your pocket

Even if the latest diet fad does succeed in ridding you of some excess weight, sadly, it may not last. On the other hand, the enormous cost of shakes, tablets, supplements and so on may well leave a permanent dent in your wallet.

4. Your social life will suffer

No one enjoys the company of someone intent on following some bizarre eating regime and looking miserable while everyone else tucks enthusiastically into the buffet. If you have unsympathetic friends, your invitations to social events may start to dry up and soon you will only have your green slime meal replacement for company.

5. Fad diets can make you fat

There’s a pretty good chance you could regain the weight, plus a few extra pounds for good measure. The odds are stacked against the fad dieter, with statistics showing that 95% of dieters will not succeed in losing weight and keeping it off.

This didn’t work out as I’d planned (Picture: Deyangeorgiev)

6. Denial and deprivation often leads to overeating

If you ban all your favourite foods, you’ll crave them all the more and probably end up bingeing on them. Enough said.

7. It won’t do wonders for your metabolism

Yo-yo dieting teaches your body to be as efficient as possible with food, meaning that you then burn fewer calories when at rest. Then when you over-eat, your body stores as much fat as it can, in preparation for the next ‘famine’ when you re-start your diet. Losing weight and keeping it off thus becomes harder and harder.